Romney on rise, new polls indicate

Both campaigns expected shift after debate performances

Cadets at Virginia Military Institute pray before a foreign policy speech by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Monday. Romney’s debate performance last week sparked gains in national polls.

WASHINGTON — Initial polling conducted since last Wednesday's debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney confirms the expectations of strategists in both parties: Momentum in the presidential race has shifted, but the contest has not been upended.

The latest numbers from the Gallup Poll, released Monday, show a deadlocked race. Obama and Romney each was favored by 47 percent of registered voters. The survey was conducted from Thursday through Saturday, and had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

In the latest national poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, Romney wiped out Obama's lead in the previous poll.

Romney's Pew lead was propelled in part by the growing support of women and younger and educated adults, while increasing his advantage with white voters.

Overall, Romney was backed by 49 percent of likely voters, and Obama had the support of 45 percent. The 4-point difference was within the poll's margin of sampling error of 3 percentage points for each candidate. Obama had an 8-point lead among likely voters in the Pew poll conducted last month.

In the latest poll, women were split with 47 percent for each candidate. Men preferred Romney, 51 percent to 43 percent. Last month, Obama had an 18-point advantage among women, and men were almost evenly divided.

Similarly, voters under 50 were closely divided between the candidates: In September, Obama had a 17-point edge with those voters..

The telephone polls were conducted Sept. 12-16 with 2,192 likely

voters and Oct. 4- 7 with 1,112 likely voters.

Throughout the campaign, Gallup's numbers have shown the race closer than some other national polls. Additional opinion surveys, to be released over the next few days, will help give a clearer sense of just how much the shape of the presidential race was altered by the debate. Of particular importance will be the polling in battleground states where the race will be decided.

Obama aides said over the weekend that the president will be more aggressive in his next debate with Romney, on Tuesday of next week (the vice-presidential candidates will debate this Thursday).

Obama, in remarks to donors in Los Angeles on Sunday night, acknowledged publicly for the first time that his debate performance didn't measure up and compared it to "bumps in the road" from his last campaign.

Gallup's polling indicated just how bad a night he had. Calling Romney's debate showing a win of "historic" proportions, it found that even Democratic voters concluded that Romney had done a better job than Obama.

Overall, 72 percent of debate watchers said Romney had won, compared with just 20 percent who said the president did a better job.

That 52-point edge was larger than the previous Gallup debate record, in 1992, when Bill Clinton outperformed President George H.W. Bush by 42 points in a town-hall-style forum that also included third-party candidate Ross Perot.

The first post-debate polling, as is usually the case, was likely to have been influenced as much or more by news coverage than what happened on the night of the event.

According to Gallup's Jeffrey M. Jones, the impact of the debate "was not so strong that it changed the race to the point where Romney emerged as the leader among registered voters."

But, he added, "even that small movement is significant, given the competitiveness of the race throughout this presidential campaign year and the fact that debates rarely transform presidential election races."